Popular Japanese writer Yoshimoto (Lizard, 1994, etc.) abandons her usual edgy hip minimalism for a maudlin and pretentious take on death and the meaning of life as she tells the story of a young woman's search for redemption. The sorrows just keep piling up for our poor twentysomething narrator, Saku-chan. Her father died of an aneurysm when she was a child; her mother remarried and then divorced; her sister Mayu, a famous actress, suddenly died; and when Saku-chan falls down some stairs and cuts her head open, she loses her memory. But this same fall, ironically, ultimately allows her to heal, though the process will be long and minutely detailed. Saku-chan lives at home with her mother, a cousin, her young half-brother Yoshio, and a woman friend of her mother's. Meanwhile, she works at a bar, has few interests, and seems content to drift through life. Working now to retrieve her memory at least gives her something to do. As Saku- chan tries to recall her past, she meets up with Ryichir, a writer and her sister Mayu's lover. The two sleep together, but Ryichir is restless and often away traveling. Brother Yoshio is also having troubles of his own. He stays away from school and, when pressed, tells Saku-chan that he's subject to premonitions and disturbing dreams. Saku-chan and Yoshio grow closer: They vacation together, ponder the strange dreams they experience, and think about the meaning of life. Yoshio eventually finds acceptance at a school for autistic and special children. But it's only after a visit to the ghost-haunted island of Saipan that Saku-chan, her memory recovered, accepts her sister's death. A hurried epilogue breathlessly wraps things up as a healed Saku-chan explains that she's now ready to ``flow endlessly through life.'' Yoshimoto tries hard to be deep here but flounders in the shallows. (First printing of 50,000; $75,000 ad/promo)
Pub Date: July 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-8021-1590-X
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1997
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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